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Click through to read a very good essay on art & time by Karen Archey for MAP.

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4 Dimensional Time paintings, pre-finish.

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Notes on Dimensional Time [Dissertation Notes 5]

Dissertation Notes 5 Some non-linear notations on time, money, democracy, fear, power, morality, networks, history, drama, news, management, disease and solution [My Master's thesis posited the end of the epistemological era. Where there is no truth, there is cause to suspend belief. Whether that cause is just in itself an active agent as causation, and so the conditions for circularity, or infinite feedback loop, absent truth, belief or justice, and only automatic cause.] > Max Weber's approving citation of Benjamin Franklin's "Time is money," as a sign of good Protestantism, is today translated into the provisions of self-management, and specifically time-management. Money was a relatively new invention in Franklin's time, a creation of John Law in the preceding century, Law being a Scot in service to the French King Louis XV. Money by Law's invention now was paper and promise, and credit made paper debt a function of time. Franklin might have said, "Money is nothing but a calculated risk," or even "Money is nothing," or "Money is a complex time-based dimensional construct..." Today, Ben Franklin might say, "I am money." That would be the most true thing he could say, and that would be a lie, too, if not a negation of self, even a blasphemy, as a Letourian iconoclash. Ben Franklin is not his graven image on the American 100 dollar bill, but now he is, over and over. Walter Benjamin might have some comment on this reproductive fault line, but he is not with us. By his own hand, his time was up, in 1940. What Walter Benjamin said in Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction applies, extractively: >>

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically: "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate." Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

<< Okay, so he was wrong about film, dimensionally. Money is "(t)heir most powerful agent." All one has to do is think of the renaming of college football bowl games in America, and the stadiums they're played in, after corporations and their products, to get the gist, on the macro level. David Foster Wallace had it right in *Infinite Jest*, imagining the corporate branding of years. Some stir occurred a few years ago when people were quasi-celebrated or -denounced for branding themselves with corporate logo tattoos. But marking flesh to empower NIKE or whatever seems extreme, the practice of defining (or defiling) one's bodily temple, so to speak, to pitch the processing or consuming of humanity in bio-sacral terms, is de rigueur in contemporary fashion, as an element of style as it were, since most people who clothe themselves with store-bought apparel do so in conjunction with ostentation as self-branding, and pay on a progressive scale to do so. Self-branding is an advertising scheme, and in advertising or more broadly, marketing, the scheme is time-based, involves money or another in-kind exchange, as in the case of stars on the red carpet, making the components more or less fungible. To envision the barter or sale of body-billboard as a method of self-enslavement by "choice" is not lost on some, but most fail to quibble with the methodology or its beneficiaries, apart from the reactionaries who read Adbusters, and who have the nerve to de-brand their clothed selves, or better yet, re-brand themselves with alt.logos, like the anarchy symbol. The bigger question is whether slavery as a function of time enables people to be purchased under the auspices of employment, consuming, as biparteid activities of managed occupation and/or avocation. In other words, let us examine self-indenture as identity, which is a medium of debt. Choice is the agency that adversely (or perversely) legalizes the action, a variation of external management, hardly separable from indoctrination, though in the end it must be. Business knows how to get around the annoyance of regulation, and it must be plain to see, that the biggest and best businesses, meaning those with the biggest bottom lines - even if the fat is hidden in the financials - as with NPOs or NGOs - rely on extraction/exploitation for success, and one of history's most reliable income generators is the human resource. Labor isn't really extreme enough in characterizing the exchange, since it is only slavery chained to the money-workaround, the anti-slavery regulation getting-over. This is one area where Marx got it wrong, or didn't go far enough. Romanticizing labor isn't enough as we've learned. Philosophy, to anthropomorphize the discipline, and Schirmacher calls Marx the greatest "applied philosopher," got wrangled into "the discourse" of economy, by being fooled into the belief that paying the human resource with any kind of scrip is a rationalization of slavery, leading to a systemic evaluation of effects absent causation, except in the vernacular of terror. In the raw, the relation is clear, whether the example is found in the urban sweat shop or the mines burrowing into the mountains of the countryside. The bloody game is how to make the unjustifiable justified, how to make a man, woman or child a slave to profiteering, and the profiteer, which is the science of productivity, as a compartment within the fulfilled life, in service to a grand master. Capital is only one face of this clock-tower Ravana. The insidiousness of Drucker's contention that Management should be a liberal art finally only proves how blind the society has become to the evil inherent in the system of time-money encompassing the pre-birth>post-death cycle of humanity, as shared and individual consciousness. Economics isn't a science, nor is it an art. It is the false ideology (applied) for the legitimation of the illegitimate awareness of money as the timemaster. Time is one of the central planks of the platform, the marking of time, the buying and selling of it. In housing, it's the timeshare, the lease, the rental, the mortgage. With paid slavery, it's "clocking in." The language is rife with time-slave vernacular: buying on time; pay over time... What is this great bugaboo, inflation? The buying power over time index, which is why Greenspanian/Bernankeian/Randian inflation is kept artificially low - it is linked to buying people over time, as in labor cost calculations. It is a "parasite" killer in Greenspan lingo. No wonder Tom Delay was such a valuable tool to Bush and base. His experience in the pest control business in Texas made him an asset against humanity. The linkage of property ownership and consciousness, has made the processing of human slavery a calculus of deceits. The great cover up, the biggest lie, the true untold story is that working for a living on the clock is slavery by proxy, on time, in the service of ink on paper. Once one confronts this inconvenient truth, the rest of the symptoms reveal themselves in short order. It's only a question of following the money to understand the extent of the corruption, to understand the cruel prohibitions against not "playing along," the secondary effects of anxiety and fear that attach to the scheme, and the equivocations that are required to convince the free agent that no alternative exists. "It's always been this way." "Everyone is doing it." "What choice did I have?" Arendt's analysis of Eichmann is fair enough, as it goes, but what of the genocidal passages in the Torah? What of Cerro Rico? What of Iraq? What is the prevalent scheme? Anything that competes with the definition of time in relation to anything but money must be smashed. Anything that competes with the definition of man, or any of his activities, in relation to anything but money, must be destroyed. Anything that would provide safe haven for anything that opposes the scheme - whether spiritual, emotional, intellectual or physical - must be liquidated. Time is money, sure and money is everything, even if it can't buy you love (it can buy you a prostitute). The Times Weekend section considers three prostitute-serial killers documented as operators on Long Island. Are the phenomena related? Is the murderous behavior time-based, like New Media? Was there money in it? Where? If man reveres the mountain in relation to himself absent the power of money, the mountain must be knocked down. The same goes for the ocean, or the heavens, the woods, the desert, or any other natural imaginary - it's only the destructive terminology that must be modified to fit the incidence of destruction. All must be made subservient to the linkage of time and money. Life itself must not prevail in any free manifestation. God must be linked to alms. The mind must be fashioned into a terrible thing to waste, then wasted. The body must be made productive, then used up. Feelings must be bound to purchase. Birth must cost, and death. A woman produces the child after labor, then the bill comes by post. Death is in the eyes of the law translated into the execution of an estate. Breath even must become commoditized. Have a smoke. Buy oxygen. Zizec at his CUNY lecture suggested that everything be capitalized. In some form, this has been accomplished, or rest assured, some entrepreneur or creative team will be on the job, devoting their time and money to creating a new market. Sickness is an industry. Sex is a business (the oldest one). War is the richest money maker and waster of all. The roof over one's head is determined by revenue. Status is tied to money, and the management of it, either as a form of wisdom or wanton disregard for the long view. Either one is Buffett, or any of the other here-today, gone-tomorrow wealthy wasters. Atop the heap of scrabblers are the old-money families, who are projected as winners over time, worshipped for their individual and collective prowess for clinging to power, status, conjugal or carnal strategic interrelations and wealth. The Royals. The bloodlines of Europe, who post-Revolutions must unhappily foster socially responsible images or lay relatively low, with managed identities, as they reap the rewards of centuries of exploitation and extraction. The whole thing fucking stinks. > But what of the solution, and by that one must mean the reckoning. What good has President Obama's policy of looking forward and not backwards at the host of crimes committed under the auspices of the previous administration(s) [...torture, fraud, theft, environmental devastation, murder, spying, etc.] accomplished? Wall Street is back to business as usual, Bush is on paid vacation in a news, vaccuum. The warrantless wiretaps continue, as do the "victorious" wars in the Middle East. Rove is a pundit for FOX and is working again as a political fixer. Gitmo is still open... For a hint at why so little gets done, justice-wise, one must recognize what "too big to fail" actually means. The men and corporations and governments who have caused such damage and suffering don't have to plead the 5th Amendment anymore. They only have to remind the prosecutor that his successful acquisition of his current position is a function of complicity in the big complex, and the reminder is a threat. Bring me down, it all comes down, including your little piece of it. What is "it?" Arendt notes the excuses of the criminal and the proper response in her books, and what these reveal about civilization as monstrosity. Hannah Arendt's description of the failed criteria for prosecuting Nazi war criminals, which was too small for the crimes, is helpful in considering all such unfathomable crimes against humanity, and can be extended to encompass the totality of European-originating time-crimes, from Scotland (Glencoe), to Cerro Rico, to Nuremberg, to Davos or Salzburg, as a proposition. The reality that "No one is innocent" now is not just a Sex Pistols record, featuring a wanted criminal as lead singer, filling the void emptied by the leads' departure from the band. Although you might think so, if you Google the phrase. Neither is it a movie quote from Twin Peaks or Repo Man. It's not a quote by Patrick Moynihan either. Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, "The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil." Even when posited as a modern phenomenon, the assignment of guilt is an ontologically forlorn endeavor, but not hopeless. Quite the contrary. It is a celebration of innocence over guilt, as meme of humanity. What is at stake? >>

Human life has never been cheaper than it is at the present time. Today, no nation renounces the intentional killing civilians in war as immoral, as seen in the universal acceptance of aerial bombing of urban centers, and some nations consider it virtually a sacrament. No one is innocent, no one has a right to be spared, therefore no one morally culpable for atrocity. In the the present time of uneasy peace, the rising tide of terrorism and civil war makes Tadeusz Borowski's chilling words from Auschwitz relevant to the whole world of today: "Observe in what an original world we are living: how many men can you find in Europe who have never killed, or whom somebody does not wish to kill?" And for all advocates of extreme and immediate social change, liberal-humanist individualism is an obstacle to be circumvented or knocked aside in the pursuit of the reformulation of society in accordance with collective (class-class conscious or racial-nationalist) ideals. In philosophic and intellectual circles anti-egologists and anti-metaphysicians, following Heidegger, Foucault, and the structuralists, have attacked the conception of the integrity of the individual as an unjustifiable, anachronistic metaphysical claim. The New Left, feminists, and various brands of Marxists have branded humanism an ideology of domination, as the ideology of the supremacy of adult Euro-American males with their self-proclaimed rationality and technical mastery. From the opposite end of the spectrum, the radical right claims that humanism undercuts any possibility of morality, community, and the recognition of super-individual values.

...

Those who have actually heard the sound of jackboots on the stairs may not find the question of humanism esoteric or anachronistic. They take philosophy somewhat more seriously than many critics. Experience has shown them that words and symbols have concrete meanings, that texts refer to realities outside themselves, that a speech at a rally, a mark in a ledger, a star sewn into an overcoat can signify the end of one's private life, can mean barking dogs, starvation, and murder. They know that ideas can have brutal meaning, that romantic ideals of national unity and purity at which intellectuals may laugh have a direct translation in terms of iron and blood. They are aware that the impact of a rifle butt on an apartment door is the most eloquent argument for the the validity of humanism and for its definitive position within the intellectual basis of modernity.

<< - Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-culture ("Epilogue: Humanism, Democracy and Culture) > To situate outrage or resistance in terms of humanism is to not quite go far enough. To postulate the reach of democracy and its effectiveness at combating evil as hegemony or tyranny of whatever kind is not sufficient. The idea of killing time as an anti-thesis or antidote to time well spent is lost in the distinction between leisure and work as polarities in a well-managed life fulfilled. This creed of "the good life" has been demonstrated to be inadequate to the task. Balance is impossible in a world where the guilty are innocent and the innocent guilty, and suffering is redefined as too-big-to-fail productivity. Parsing the dimensional trauma requires dimensional tools and techniques in the emergency state, and in a perpetuated cataclysmic state of unending crime and destruction, the opportunity for relief is the driver for every kind of perversion and iniquity. If the goal is to infect everyone, then call the poison virus a cure. When reflecting on BP's oil spill in the Gulf, only one of many, or the escalating nuclear crisis in Japan, which is now comparable to Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl, the Depression 3.0 of 2007-present, the escalating war zone of the (entire) Mideast, or any of a million million preventable criminal phenomena we can witness, if only by electronic proxy, one can acknowledge that no time-crime tribunal will be appointed by President Obama or the US Congress any time soon, and none will ever be until humanity wills it. But will it we must. Is there really a solution? First we must kill time, and money, and then the rest will flow, as Csikszentmihalyi would put it. Then, we could examine with intelligence and wisdom a statement such as (now-ex-) BP CEO's pathetic, banal and evil utterance, "I'd like my life back." The unfathomable nature of this statement, when juxtaposed with the massive damage BP inflicted on nature and man, only points to the status quo. The bow on this pile of shit is Tony Hayward's lateral move in BP. He is still gainfully employed. > Peter Lamarque gets at the issue by delving into fiction. The subject is pertinent to the narrative development of this essay, by linkage, through futurist Bruce Sterling's current fascination with design fiction. ...It is about time, but it is also about identifying with the other in time, possibly as a means for ignoring one's actual intractable condition as a slave of time and money-power. Which makes Lamarque's subjective choice worth noting. Kings and time are fodder for stop-start fiction, from Shakespeare's MacBeth, etc., to Kurosawa's Ran. Lamarque writes: >>

Desdemona lies innocent and helpless on the bed. Over her towers Othello who pronounces with solemn finality: 'Thou art to die.' The enormity and horror of what is about to happen fills us with anger and dismay. ''Tis too late.' Othello has resolved to act and, deaf to his wife's most pitiful pleas, he suffocates and kills her.

...

No one is in fact murdered in the performance of Othello, just as no one is in fact jealous or innocent. And we know that. On the other hand, we respond often enough with a range of emotions, including fear and pity, that seem to be explicable only on the assumption that we do after all believe there to be real suffering or real danger. For how can we feel fear when we do not believe there to be any danger? How can we feel pity when we do not believe there to be any suffering.

<< - Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology by Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen > The prosecution of time-crime must be merciless. The Davos Man fears the suicide bomber above all else. He should fear the end of time more, and the end of fear. > Shopenhauer offers a clue to time-based relational contingencies expressed in the visual domain, when he writes, "Now, for the reason that much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense willing, the facial expression of very bad people already bears the stamp of inward suffering. If we set aside the reality that we today have many prime examples of very bad people whose image management is so sophisticated that nothing in or upon their faces indicates any minutiae of inward suffering, we can at least turn toward the human response systems that artificially mitigate the intolerable circumstance of subservience to the hegemony of time-fear-death-power. Schopenhauer existed prior to the Second Life avatar, as phenomenon, but he points to our willingness to be deceived, on moral grounds. Most of our responses to bad-suffering currently are administered via electronic devices, and reinforced socially in real time through social convention. What on earth, for instance, is innocent or real about Reality TV, whether the subject is crime and punishment, war (as in the operations of embedded journalists in Iraq), the ugly rich, or the drug-addicted, or the obese, or to frame it in broader terms, the Newscast? To implicate the camera and the processing power of reproductive technology (speaking of visual image and audio capture, although the coincidental reference is noteworthy), is obvious and in direct contraposition to the arts and humanities. Whatever the initial idealism, after the war-motivated invention of the internet, of early web pioneers, the obvious certainty is that the promised capacity of the online network to generate a solution for time-fear-death-power complexes has proven false. The infinity of virtual time is a myth, as is the web's encouragement of anonymous courage except in anomalous movements. Artificial intelligence of any humane type is abandoned, except as a fictional conjecture. The invisible hands of greed as we speak are strangling the life out of the free web, in a blatant capitulation to potent interests like Verizon and News Corp., whose criminal behavior is well-documented, especially in the realm of surveillance or privacy erasure and propaganda generation, absent all libel and slander regulation. Fair and balanced indeed. And still people weep at the dramas of Reality TV. > The revolution will not be digitized. Y2K was the beginning of the beginning of the end, although the processing of the Internet, from democratic commons to enslaved medium began as soon as the network proved itself as a valuable free utility. The camera, the capturer of time, became a liar during the Civil War, or The War Between the States, when the power of suggestion by light, film, and mechanical reproduction was proved a boon to war profiteers. When electricity could be domesticated, the free days of transmitted human knowledge ended, and the hegemony of ATT commenced. The corporation is winning and doesn't even exist. It's not that no one is innocent, it's that the guilty don't exist. > April 10 >>

If I wanted to dramatize somewhat the general problem we all face, I would say that what we have to do is to reinvent the newspaper in a completely new form (this is why Lippman’s wisdom is so important). If it is true, as many historians have shown, that there is a direct link between the invention of the newspaper and the possibility for citizens to articulate political opinions, and if it is true that the old newspaper appears retrospectively as a platform connecting heterogeneous data, then it is extremely urgent to reinvent a platform no longer on paper but in the newly rematerialized world of digital datascapes. Digital democracy has generated a lot of hype, but I believe, as many of you here, that its true development is still to come and that it will be necessary to invest also, in no small part, in the theoretical import of the notion of network as this conference proposes to do. When Lippmann said the public is a phantom, this was not a way to say it does not exist, but on the contrary a plea—and a somewhat desperate plea—to make it appear through the invention of the right tools.

<< - Bruno Latour - “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-‐network Theorist”* (Keynote speech for the INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON NETWORK THEORY: NETWORK MULTIDIMENSIONALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE 19th February 2010 Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Los Angeles; To be published in International Journal of Communication special issue edited by Manuel Castells. > [REVIEW]: The NY Times is the subject of a 4D scan, conducted over time, in conjunction with the thesis and dissertation; and the threads this weekend are plentiful. The headline story (and several linked ones) focuses on the dark and vile pantomime of Congress and its macabre performance on the budget and the shutdown of government. Of course, the objectivity platform of NYT doesn't frame the episode in this manner. ...What happened to the NYT digital subscriber switchover? ...Did Iceland really just say no to bankster pressure to force the innocent citizens to assume the "losses" incurred by the financial sector elite and their beneficiaries? ...Wikileaks? ...Japan? ...The Times and the Washington Post are remembering American Civil War as a preventative measure. ...Paul Krugman will tell the truth again this week about the economics of slavery, up to a point. Austerity and debt will hover over the human interest stories. ...Herbert is gone. Money will be the overarching topic of every story. Power will be parsed. Deaths will be noted. Fear will be promoted, and diversion, attached. ...The S&P 500 is down 12.39 and stands at 1,311.67. ...Today's film critic's pick is "The Passion of Joan of Arc." ...A Royal wedding approaches. ...Carnage in Libya and drones in Pakistan. ...At JFK one plane "clips" another... "The Burden of College Loans on Graduates Grows." ... "Gulf's Complexity and Resilience Seen in Studies on Oil Spill." What is the cost of knowledge? >>

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so. While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time. “In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

<< What is the cost of a BP oil spill? >>

Dr. Hazen was looking to track the fate of the underwater oil as it spread and instead found it to be entirely gone. “We can detect down to 2 parts per billion,” he said, “but nothing was there.” His work was financed by a grant his lab won from BP, the owner of the well, long before the spill, and it was not in any way reviewed or influenced by the company, he said.

<< And finally, the nut: >>

"Middle-class America experienced a lost decade in their retirement accounts, whereas executives enjoyed record compensation packages through the subterfuge of stock option programs," Mr. Meyers says. "There has been a massive wealth transfer from middle-class America's retirement accounts to the bank accounts of the privileged few. The social consequences of this wealth transfer bear scrutiny."

<< - "Enriching a Few at the Expense of Many" by Gretchen Morgensen Business as usual... Y2K, TARP, the Iraq Invasion, the spectacle of closing the BP well, the fabled Facebook rebellion in Egypt... the budget negotiations, the tax break for the rich, the revelation that GE pays no taxes, the CEO's appointment to the Obama Administration... > >>

Along with material success comes prestige. Salaries and positions translate into dinner parties with important people, heads that turn when one enters the conference room.

<< - Lisa Peattie, "Normalizing the Unthinkable" >>

Evil is never "radical,"... it is only extreme, and... it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension... It is "thought- defying"... because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality."

<< —Hannah Arendt, 1964 [SUMMATION (in the voice of Schopenhauer)]: There is no currency with Walter Benjamin's face.

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Drawings made during the Laruelle panel.

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[NoDT] Dissertation Notes 3

Dissertation Notes 3 by Paul McLean Meditation on The Mountain

1 An exemplar object for the study of dimensional time is the mountain. Men and mountains are naturally linked by most of the essentials that dimensional time hinges on, at least from a human point of view. This is true in art, as explored over the past year with the Matterhorn Project. [As a triangulating perspectival point, we introduced the phenomenon of Cerro Rico, and the city at its base, Potosi, in Dissertation Notes 2, but more on that below]. The mountain as a subject for artists is ancient. The landscape genre in the Western art tradition presents us many fine samples of mountains. Just listen to John Ruskin's soaring literary evocation of the mountain's majesty ["O Beautiful..."]: >>

Now we wish to draw especial attention to the broad and bold simplicity of mass, and the excessive complication of details, which influences like these, acting on an enormous scale, must inevitably produce in all mountain groups; because each individual part and promontory, being compelled to assume the same symmetrical curves as its neighbors, and to descend at precisely the same slope to the valley, falls in with their prevailing lines, and becomes a part of a great and harmonious whole, instead of an unconnected and discordant individual. It is true that each of these members has its own touches of specific character, its own projecting crags and peculiar hollows; but by far the greater portion of its lines will be such as unite with, though they do not repeat, those of its neighbors, and carry out the evidence of one great influence and spirit to the limits of the scene. This effort is farther aided by the original unity and connection of the rocks themselves, which though it often may be violently interrupted, is never without evidence of existence; for the very interruption itself forces the eye to feel that there is something to be interrupted, a sympathy and similarity of lines and fractures, which however full of variety and change of direction, never lose the appearance of symmetry of one kind or another. But, on the other hand, it is to be remembered that these great sympathizing masses are not one mountain, but a thousand mountains; that they are originally composed of a multitude of separate eminences, hewn and chiselled indeed into associating form, but each retaining still its marked points and features of character, - that each of these individual members has, by the very process which assimilated it to the rest, been divided and subdivided into equally multitudinous groups of minor mountains; finally, that the whole complicated system is interrupted forever and ever by daring manifestations of the inward mountain will - by the precipice which has submitted to no modulation of the torrent, and the peak which has bowed itself to no terror of the storm. Hence we see that the same imperative laws which require perfect simplicity of mass, require infinite and termless complication of detail, - that there will not be an inch nor a hair breadth of the gigantic heap which has not its touch of separate character, its own peculiar curve, stealing out for an instant and then melting into the common line; felt for a moment by the blue mist of the hollow beyond, then lost when it crosses the enlightened slope, - that all this multiplicity will be grouped into larger divisions, each felt by their increasing aerial perspective, and their instants of individual form, these into larger, and these into larger still, until all are merged in the great impression and prevailing energy of the tow or three vast dynastics which divide the kingdom of the scene.

[Then the critique...]

There is no vestige nor shadow of approach to such treatment as this in the whole compass of ancient art. Whoever the master, his hills, wherever he has attempted them, have not the slightest trace of association or connection; they are separate, conflicting, confused, petty and paltry heaps of earth; there is no marking of distances or divisions in their body; they may have holes in them, but no valleys, - protuberances and excrescences, but no parts; and in consequence are invariably diminutive and contemptible in their whole appearance and impression.

<< Ruskin, MODERN PAINTERS, Of Truth of Earth, Part II, Section IV, Chapter III

Is Ruskin describing man or mountain, or both dimensionally in the "space" of art? In his critique, though, Ruskin fails to acknowledge the ancient Chinese painting tradition where it intersects the Western one, at the point of the mountain, as documented in The Mustard Seed Garden manual of painting. Granted, the Eastern painting is not possible to extract either from calligraphy or the animation of the perceptual complex Chinese pre-modern [meaning pre-Western exposure] art evidences. So, even though it's arguable that a painted Chinese mountain of 1000 years ago is even art, by traditional Western standards, the craft of painting mountains on that side of the world is as rich and developed as the mountain-painting Ruskin describes, in dimensional terms. To gain some perspective on the depth of meaning the Eastern man associates with the mountain, one can delve into the I Ching, the Book of Changes. Here's a good translation: http://theabysmal.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/i-ching-hexagram-52/ ... >>

THE JUDGMENT KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still So that he no longer feels his body. He goes into his courtyard And does not see his people. No blame. ... THE IMAGE Mountains standing close together: The image of KEEPING STILL. Thus the superior man Does not permit his thoughts To go beyond his situation

2 Modernity, which I would suggest means "Life lived under the duress of a 'Free Market,' projects a very diverse scope of contingent conditions affecting both man and mountain, as both confusion and as aggression. One can ask, "How do the enemies of modernity, like Osama bin Laden, avoid its penalties?" They hide in mountains, using honeycomb systems of interlinked tunnels within mountains to foil the aims of the latest imperialists seeking power in the neighborhood. The Afghanis opposed to the West's great military operate underground as often as they do in the light of day to wreak havoc on the occupier, the so-called liberator. This is no commentary on the ideological or theological motivations of the Afghani rebel, any more than it would be if applied to the Japanese on Iwo Jima, or the Swiss, who built massive fortresses in the Alps to anticipate the German invaders, with preparations to sacrifice the majority of their people. Or to situate the analysis in America, there is probably no better comparative example than Colorado Springs. What of modernity doesn't apply? Tesla tested his "magnifying transmitter" there. Pike's Peak became a flame to which the moths of extraction and exploitation flew, possessed by gold fever. Rockefeller, the ancestor of the fellow at MoMA, he of too-big-to-fail Chase Bank, made his bones in the Colorado labor wars, which swirled about Colorado City like a tornado of blood and greed. South Park, Colorado [is that enough to mention on that one?]. Ike Eisenhower, he of the warnings to his country of the dangers of the military-industrial syndicates, chose Colorado Springs from a list of several hundred candidate locations, to be the host for the US Air Force Academy. Most significantly, though, certainly, is NORAD, burrowed deep into Cheyenne Mountain. Does anyone remember who the Cheyenne were, and are? In the context of NORAD, it is only a short leap to the Internet, designed as an answer to the fear of nuclear war with the Reds. Not *those* reds(kins). Today, Native Americans make up .8% of the Colorado Springs population of less than half-a-million souls, according to the 2010 Census, and 2006-8 Community Survey. To round out our visit to Colorado Springs, we should acknowledge that the city, in addition to the USAFA, hosts the nation's most extensive Olympic training facilities. As a nod to dimensional time, it's worth a visit to the "Cave of the Winds" geology page for a general study of the history of the mountain range in which Colorado Springs is nestled (http://www.caveofthewinds.com/PikesPeakRegion.aspx).

...Potosi and Colorado Springs could be modern "sister cities," if you think on it. Ruskin's mountain-thinking, as a schematic, dimensionally applies to our examples above, and to the Matterhorns, too, structurally anyway. Maybe of all, the Disney Matterhorn and Cheyenne Mountain have the most in common, although the T[D]ios of Cerro Rico and Disney Matterhorn's abominable snowmen seem very close, in a purely mechanical way, as modernity devices.

As a related phenomenon, we should address the modern practice of mountaintop removal, as practiced by companies like Massey in the once-beautiful hills of my home state, West Virginia. Modern man, to extract and exploit, has no qualms, behind the armor of corporate artificiality, to shear the pinnacle of a mountain to get at the minerals inside. Another is the modern praxis of technical mountaineering, the object of which is to stylistically create spectacle, from bottom to summit, as animation of a narrative experience every bit as romantic as the "mountain man" of yore. In the face of death. To reach the highest point, to gaze out upon the earth from above... a man or woman, standing sturdy between the high ground beneath his boots and the heavens above. What a view! And what GEAR! Half of New York (including the author) wears North Face in winter, and boots, bags, and webbing derivative of mountaineering science!

And what of the language, in its idioms? "If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed." Or spiritual music: "Go, Tell It on the Mountain!" >>

Go, tell it on the mountain, Over the hills and everywhere Go, tell it on the mountain, That Jesus Christ is born.

And what about the giant Buddhas carved into the mountains of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, whose destruction by the Taliban evoked universal outrage by the global cultural community (as chronicled in Christian Frei's documentary)? Or the stony faces carved into Mt. Rushmore, now joined by Crazy Horse astride a stony steed? But the fixation on the Mountain as content or expressive source material, as data even, is clearly not limited to the artistic enterprise. In American nostalgic and romantic mythology, "the mountain man" is a powerful dream-figure, an independent character of great resourcefulness optimized as a paradigm of the national spirit. Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson is the cinematic avatar of the projection. As Weatherford points out in Indian Givers, the myth doesn't measure well against the historical record, but it's often the case. > By Googling "Mountain and Man," we can generate some wonderful and unexpected dimensional connections. For instance, Chris Ousley's "The Matterhorn Mountain painting, in acrylic on canvas panel, available for purchase at dailypainters[dot]com for just $25 US is a lovely piece.

> Finally, as an artificial consideration, we cannot avoid witnessing the man-made mountain of waste, the symptomatic totem of the Free Market, "wasicu" economy. We can start with our test case. The original Quechua name of Cerro Rico was Sumaj Urqu, translated "majestic mountain." Here's a grim overview of the devastation caused by centuries of mining Cerro Rico, from The Accidental Explorer (http://www.accidentalexplorer.com/?p=37). Cerro Rico, according to another report, is potentially collapsible (http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-years-bolivian-silver-mountain-collapse.html). The honeycombed innards of the mountain won't continue to support the mass above. Note - the comment section for this article is itself a rich vein for dimensional analysis. Is there a problem here? Not for a Free Marketeer! In effect, the "majestic" mountain's been turned inside out, and the guts of it are strewn across the topology in all directions, poisoning the people and every other living thing exposed to the industrial by-products of exploitation. In corporate lingo, this is an "externality." By corporate standards, this is not only OK, the scenario is in its own way beautiful! An interactive artwork by the Invisible Hand! For another essay on the ecological ramifications of mining the Cerro Rico, see this piece for Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2149482/) by Patrick Stack. There are dozens more. Waste is the medium of the Free Market, and we live in its all-over technique.

In my home state of West Virginia, the waste from mountaintop removal is summarily dumped into the valleys surrounding the mining operation, effectively destroying sections of the North American continent's most diverse ecology. Our family home tilted by something like 18" or degrees, I forget which, being no engineer and such, because deep beneath the house's foundation, mines were collapsing. Cost of doing business? A pool table would have to be propped to work on the horizontal plane. Fascinating side-effects, disclosed as relevant anecdote! > To paraphrase the Mohammedan phrase, if there's gold, coal or whatever, under the mountain, rip up or down the mountain, to get at it. You can make another mountain with the remnants, just as good. While the three reports above focus on the ecological devastation caused by industrial waste praxis in Bolivia, the bigger picture is even stranger. The world is disappearing under mountains of garbage. A good resource to reference is Waste & Recycling News. The net user can easily access intel, stats, research - KNOWLEDGE - and so on, about the garbage industry. Or one can visit Oprah's site and discover that the biggest landfill is actually underwater, and in the process of destroying the oceanic ecosystems from Japan to California, with Hawaii working as the accidental filter! The Free Market in action! (http://www.oprah.com/world/Ocean-Pollution-Fabien-Cousteaus-Warning-to-the-World)

This just in: BP wants to drill again in the Gulf of Mexico! > Perhaps this is good point to rejoin our narrative thread, to confront the mind-sickness that is man's current perception of time, and his associated fear complex. Nothing it would seem is more pressing than the issue of climate change looming over the modern world. Drucker worried about it, at the same time he expressed worries about the global multinational [without connecting any dots between the two phenomena, in any actionable manner, which is to say, without proposing any solutions; which is too bad, given his fabulous contributions to the problem, as a creative mind bent on solving critical management conundrums for all sectors of the dimensional society]. It's not unreasonable to worry, given the evidence.

Photo by Irina Zhorov

If geology is the study, in one of its aspects, of the forming of mountains, then we can rely on it to inform us about mountainous timelines. Geological time and mountains are not readily comprehensible to the human mind. It's not easy to look at the mighty mountain and grasp the idea that it took a billion years for the range in front of the viewer to actualize. If fire and violent upheaval birthed the mountain, then water and wind in their multiple manifestations are the shapers of mountains. What is a little person, who'll probably not live past 100 years, to make of data that suggests that the glacier is shaping the mountain, in real time, but at a real pace so slow as to make the shaping invisible as a process? Along the same lines, and incorporating some of the same kind of analysis by which we are made conscious of the damage done by the exploiter/extractor waste-producers, what is a little person to make of the disappearing glaciers across the globe? The ones proximal to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, for instance? While corrupt politicians resist any regulation of the industries who buy politicians relatively cheaply, by legal and illegal means, the glaciers melt, and the mountains of garbage seeping poison wherever they are, how can a little person but wonder at the drama? While the battle for better wages for miners, and living conditions for their families amidst the wreckage of nature, is in its own way a necessity, a freedom fight, as it were, is this war against the false ideology of short-term ROI not an overarching necessity? Of course it is. Any sane person can recognize it. And any sane person would say, "Who cares who you think you are, while this is happening to all of us!" > In Iceland, which a few years ago was a model nation, fiscally stable, socially conscious and enlightened, not at war with anyone, with good education and health care, the financial sector has destroyed the peace with short-term greed. A volcano erupts, crippling air traffic across Europe, and making people sick. Lava is spewing again from Kilauea. On March 7th, 2011, TIME's Newsfeed reported," Scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory say the floor of Kilauea dropped at least 377 feet Saturday afternoon, cracking open a fissure in the volcano and kicking off the lava flow. At the peak of the show, lava was shooting more than 80 feet into the air. (http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/07/hawaiis-kilauea-volcano-erupts-shooting-lava-80-feet-into-the-air/#ixzz1IaIoexdx) The video is lovely. From Haiti - now that was a Free-Market/Disaster phenomenon - to Indonesia, the catastrophes accumulate, and our collective response is... time-based, and fearful, no? Or to put it another way, paralysis. To what extent this paralysis is a media function is open to conjecture. Functional paralysis as a time-based/fear response is modern zombie-ism. Hollywood and the gaming industry have been quick to capitalize on the phenomenon, with zombie-killing movies and games. Big pharma has got in on the market, by offering a host of products that mimic the effect, exaggerate it, counteract it, and so on. The Free Market sees this is great for business, and in politics, compliance is stipulate to mean "mandate," in support of whatever heinous activity the worst-infected embark upon in their progression towards universal doom. On the other end of the spectrum, the anarchist promises us that everything is about to explode. Really?

In vulcanism, for the formation of mountains, explosions are the stuff of creativity. The irradiated, tunnel-busting bombs invented for the Afghani and Pakistani mole-terrorists haven't worked, and George W. Bush's claim of victory seems as true as (Hegel's conjecture) that free art is dead, because of the breakdown, the temporary defeat, of the top-down endowment system. Don't worry, EXXON, the failure is back on track! Never fear, young artsy, now we have Eli Broad! 3 [INTERVENTION]: Last night's Zizec presentation at CUNY aided progress in the narrative immensely. He covered many of the points raised here, in the context of globalization, economic and political situations, offering philosophical responses that are worth considering. To cut to the chase: on the main, I would suggest that Zizec's vision of the commons is really a call for active democracy, that the kind of organizational behaviors and capacities the current circumstances require are possible certainly in the basic framework of the American political system, and perhaps only in this one. Collective mass action, either in response to catastrophic natural or man-made events, is THE prime operative tool of bottom-top democracy. The checks and balances built into the system encourage the very post-revolutionary construction that turns a radical moment into a sustained movement, in opposition to the disastrous forces of nature and man that historically erupt in the course of time. The design of democracy is actually de-design, with freedom over time as the synthetic product, to put it in a Hegelian framework. It's the post-second-negation results that matter, and after writing 800 pages on Hegel, it seems obvious that Zizec is well onto this line of reasoning. Zizec's opening remarks, on prejudice against totality and progress, in which CUNY's program, based on the leadership's initial descriptions, is predestined to be mired, point at the instrumental architecture or pre-conceptual corpus on which representative, revolutionary democracy is proven to be premised. The promise and/or potential for successful episodes of free action, and/or freeing action, and/or free space fought for and earned, and so on, are actual components of American history, which has been critically examined and verified as well as any similar history, partially because of maintenance of enlightened intellectual institutions the country contains. Zizec's call for the defense of these institutions is absolutely correct. This is why the destructive artificial powers both internal and external to the US are so intent on crushing those institutions systematically. The current circumstances in Wisconsin, and elsewhere from Washington to Washington and beyond, using political and private power, relying on the weakness of academies across the land, battered by decades of dimensional all-directional assault, demonstrate precisely why a common response is the only viable counterattack. Whether paralysis or zombie-ism will preclude the immediate call-to-arms is another question to which we don't have an answer, since the events are unfolding IRL. Since the media is owned by the enemy, the average citizen won't even know that the patriotic moment is here and now. The campaigns of the globalists to suppress nationalism, or more specifically, American revolutionary action, as patriotism, not only do not serve academic freedom in the long run, in spite of the short-term returns gained from corporate sponsorship, they destroy the connection between the academic body and the general citizenry that distinguishes American democracy in its finest revolutionary moments. Without the leadership from the intellectual community, the "mob," against which the academy has become so prejudiced, must seek leadership from FOX News, or Dick Armey's fake grassroots organizers, funded by the US Chamber of Commerce, whatever and whoever that is, or corrupt and monstrous strategic entities like the Heritage Foundation. The failure of the academic community to assume its proper role and function in the execution of democracy here in the US is one of the primary causes of the democracy's impotence against brutal natural interventions and even more brutal artificial ones, such as the crash of 2007-8 through the present. The linkage is incontrovertible. Zizec characterized it comically, when he teased the academic left for cheering revolutions, as long as they were far away, but it's not a joke. The future of freedom in this country is at stake. That the academic community in general could be so willfully stupid, and in denial about this is not just evidence of ideological bias, but also of cowardice, plain and simple.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself *as a class* in order to permit the bourgeeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself *as a wage relation* in order to impose itself as a social relation - becoming capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure - as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and as a vague injunction to humility, compassion and weakness; *so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture*. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

<< TCI, TIC > After the talk as Shane and I walked down the street to Starbucks (a joke only funny if you attended the lecture or have heard Z's dimensional analysis of coffee-culture), I was able to communicate the adjustments to my propositions here about Time-sickness and Fear post-Zizec. The immediate solution is to stop clock-time wherever possible, which is everywhere. Or else everything dies. The only real commons shared by all man are pre-life (un-memory)/life (memory)/death (memorial). The only phenomenon that man truly anthropomorphizes incorrectly is death, which is the dimensional commons, and the negation of all word-meaning, against which man rarely ceases to struggle. Last words are never adequate to the task. Criticality, irony, the abject, contingency, psychoanalysis, gender, race, nationality - not sufficient. The same is true for their antitheses. The mind of the man dies along with the rest, unifying him with all he thought his mind distinguished him from. Brain-dead. The tools of self-furtherance no longer matter. The material and immaterial unite, and there is death. What to do, what to do? Mankind is collectively self-destructing, a time-addict. The good potential is going with the bad, and shock is setting in. Drugs and guns are equally useless. The addict, in spite of the reality of his condition, still hungers for more time. It's the simplest and most common narrative. > We're not quite there yet. > >>

Unlike almost all other kinds of contemporary philosophers, Zizek argues that Descartes' cogito is the basis of the subject. However, whereas most thinkers read the cogito as a substantial, transperent and fully self-conscious "I" which is in complete command of its destiny, Zizek proposes that the cogito is an empty space, what is left when the rest of the world is expelled from itself. The Symbolic Order is what substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization. The latter is where the subject is given an identity and where that identity is altered by the Self.

<< - http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm > ...Then there's the failure of Zizec to abandon his Euro-centric biases. As with TIC, it's apparently a supremely difficult proposition for Zizec to accept that revolutionary effectiveness is not only agrarian, but originally American. The lecture, ‘The Situation is Catastrophic, but Not Serious,’ to inaugurate CUNY's "new" initiative, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, touched on some of the imperatives mapped out by the program. One of the most problematic is essentially the irrelevance or undesirability of nationalism in the New World Order, which as in intended effect or not, dovetails with the Davos syndicate's propaganda for "Shared Values" and projections for relocating power to a global governance schema that ostensibly could be sited at the WEF, or Salzburg, or within a de-centered TED-type complex. Since there are now several supremely well-funded programs like or related to the Creativity/multi-sector consortiums of WEF and TED, such as the Blouin Creative Leadership Summit, and dozens of lesser versions pushed by institutional or non-profit/religious/educational entities such as Curb Foundation, the push for alt.national solutions to global problems through non-representational vehicles is not only one of the most dangerous trends, but also one of the most a priori vulnerable. Also on the cutting board at CUNY is ancestral identity, at least selectively so. Site-specificity is up for amputation, too. For Zizec, this is a function of disaster, as in Japan. Dislocation is artificially a free-market pre-requisite, as in the slave trade, now euphemistically referred to in the MGT order as "outsourcing." To be American, West Virginian, of Celtic descent, as is my case, is "an inconvenient truth" in the globalist architecture. Fuck them. Mountaineers are always free. American, home of the free and brave. Scotland the free, Scotland the brave.

This is an English translation of the poem 'Mur b'e thusa bhiodh an Cuilthionn' ('If it weren't for you the Cuillin') first published by Sorley MacLean in 1943 as part of the collection, 'Dain Do Eimhir agus Dain Eile' (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems). If it weren't for you the Cuillin would be a level of olive blue encircling with its tight belt my heart's barbarous retinue. If it weren't for you the numerous sand that lies on Talisker's compact shore would be the tablet of my wishes without the sting of salt desire If it weren't for you the huge seas both in their motion and their rest would raise the sea foam of my mind to a monument on a calm coast. While the flat brown and brindled moorland and my clear intellect would be drowsing together if it weren't for the sovereign force of your degree

<< - http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_audio.jsp?item_id=72722

#Paul McLean #art for humans #NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME #dissertation #egs